But not with the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest or silliest story, and be sure we were finishing it right.

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Aristotle meets Jesus

Aristotle depicted by Raphael, holding his Ethics: detail from the Vatican fresco The School of Athens, 1510 – 1511.

I think Chesterton is ignored today because we do not have the intellectual fortitude to understand his point. We are blinded by wit and a clever turn of phrase, but do not see the meaning behind what is said.

Thought is virga, showering us, yet dries up before it touches the soil. Because we do not believe that reality is real, thought is less than metaphysical, less than smoke. Talk is cheap and meaning is non existent.

Moral relativism is the philosophy of depression and death– a death of cold. That is, falling asleep, thinking everything is fine. All you see is the whiteness of a blank page; there appears no reason to worry. Yet reality will still devour you, and finds it easier to do so when there is no compelling reason to defend what is right.

Sadly, waking up from the numbness, from that happy drowse of nothinghood, is painful. If you wait too long, bits have to be cut off. Indeed, the pain that depressives react badly to is not the depression itself, but the backlog of emotion and pain that assaults the senses all at once. A jarring unpleasant awakening after a long, comforting rest of lethargy.

We aren’t yet ready for the apostles– or even the old testament prophets. We need Aristotle first– because we have forgotten what is real. Wanderers in the desert have more faith in what is in front of them than we have! The mental reset button was pressed by some well stuffed German philosophers– and reality vanished in a puff of logic. Even then, we were ignorant enough to take their word for things that just aren’t so, even when evidence elsewhere did not support it. Everybody wants to kill God if they are given a pass for it.